Political hactivists claiming to belong to the grassroots anti-Scientology movement Anonymous appear to have compromised a private Yahoo e-mail account belonging to Alaskan governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

On Wednesday, open-source information site Wikileaks posted screenshots of the governor's inbox and of several e-mail message from her gov.palin@yahoo.com account obtained from a person affiliating themselves with the Anonymous group, the site stated. The e-mails included messages to Amy McCorkell, a member of the Governor's Advisory Board on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse, and Alaskan Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell, according to a report in Wired News. The site credited members of "the activist group 'anonymous'" with the intrusion.

Around 1 pm PST, Wikileaks appeared to have become unreachable for unknown reasons.

"The zip archive made available by Wikileaks contains screen shots of Palins inbox, example emails, address book and two family photos," Wikileaks stated in a post visible on the site before the outage. "The list of correspondence, together with the account name, appears to re-enforce the criticism."

Political hacking is not an uncommon occurrence. In 2004, a report found that two Republican Senate staffers had taken advantage of a misconfigured server used by Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to steal at least 4,670 files over a year and a half. In 2006, online activists managed to download a copy of the company's electronic-voting system code and submit it to election officials and security experts for analysis.

In the latest incident, a member of the Anonymous group sent an e-mail to Ivy Frye, a staffer for Palin, saying that the account had been compromised, according to a screenshot posted to Wikileaks.